This invention relates to the field of web site analysis. In particular, the invention relates to measuring web site satisfaction of information needs.
The purpose of web analytics tools is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. A known web analytics tool is Google Analytics (Google is a trade mark of Google, Inc.).
Web analytics tools measure all kinds of key performance indicators (KPIs) (for example, hit rate and bounce rate) that measure the effectiveness of pages from the site, together with some global measures like the most popular browsing paths into a site's hypertext.
In addition, web analytics tools allow discovery of the terms that when used by users in internet search engine queries have brought them to a specific site.
Web analytics tools also allow measurement of whether some targets are reached by users visiting a site. For example, a site may assume that the information need of a user is fulfilled by a page whenever the user stays at least 30 seconds before leaving it.
The measurements can be analyzed by content providers in order to tune the content of their sites. To do so, they need to interpret those KPIs and try to figure out what are the users are looking for and why they like or do not like what they find in the site. There is no automated way to analyze what is the “information need” of the users browsing a site, how it evolves while browsing, and automatically detecting whether this information need is fulfilled or not, other than the time spent on a page.